Levas Kovarskis

Levas Kovarskis

Levas Kovarskis

Psychiatrist, psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, full member of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), supervisor, teacher of psychotherapy

Levas Kovarskis

Psychiatrist, psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, full member of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), supervisor, teacher of psychotherapy

Helsinki, Finland

Levas Kovarskis

Psychoanalysis?
Actually it's all about human life and relationships…

In his own words:

“at present I am mostly in private clinical practice consulting, supervising and teaching in Finland and abroad almost everything what starts with “psy-” - psychiatry, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Last years I’ve been mainly interested in cultural psychology and identity as a whole. However, my most precious set of thoughts and professional desires is connected with reframing the psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy as a moral instead of medical treatment (I call this turn “NewPsy”). The idea is old – just to mention Sigmund Freud himself, Thomas Szasz and Philip Rieff. Yet until now it was never implemented by psychoanalytic institutes in their teaching or accepted and supported as such by social institutions. This must be changed, the future of this wonderful profession depends on it, so this became the main focus of my work.”

Papers

Levas Kovarskis, 2014 Helsinki

Psychoanalysis as Epistemic Battlefield between Postmodern and Religion Authority Organization

The scientific world view, which obviously prevails in today’s Western culture, contains a very specific, still not broadly acknowledged value system. One of its most cherished values is rationality. However, when introduced as a value and organizational principle of social life, rationality soon reveals its etymological meaning [1] – relativity: the value of things is relative, it depends on their ratio. Being based on this rational-relative ground scientific World-view represents a very new kind of Episteme and actively builds up a very new moral Authority. Psychoanalysis being as much as it is rational approach to the mind has contributed substantially to the triumph of these Episteme and Authority. However Psychoanalysis itself got lost in the rapidly changing moral environment. As a social institution it has to be politically correct and comply with the postmodern Episteme, so it has to revise its charts the human mind and relational patterns, which it has produced more than a 100 years ago, in the age of early modernity. At that time these charts where bound to the self-evident (epistemic) concepts – family, child, social rules, sanity, maturity, sexual normality, clear cut gender identity, self-evident attribution of guilt and shame, causality and matter. On these “facts” of human life the coordinates of good-bad and normal-abnormal could be easily superimposed. Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy were supposed to move the person along such coordinates as insane-sane, bad-good, abnormal-normal, immature-mature, inhibited-free. These “facts” as well as co-ordinates hardly exist anymore in the postmodern society by postmodern Authority. While Psychoanalysis is trying to reconsider its findings according to the demands of rational postmodern Authority, religions are fighting back offering the group-based security, clear-cut attitude toward sexuality and magical thinking.